Crowdsourcing the Localization of Gone Home

[Music] I'm talking today about crowdsourcing the localization have gone home so in case you haven't played it I'll give you some context for what gone home is it's a first-person narrative exploration game the player wanders through a static environment you know just examining things reading content there's no puzzles no combat no NPCs anything like that it's it's all about discovering a story that's kind of encoded in the environment and the maintance storyline is delivered through these Bioshock style audio Diaries that is the player picks up certain objects and you know audio plays in over the speakers explaining somewhat what's what's going on and moving the story forward so what exactly was I thinking

about or were we thinking about when we were considering whether to localize our game at all well first thing is that I was a UI programmer on Bioshock 2 and to be honest on that game localization turned out to kind of be a mess it kind of happened at the very last minute and caused a lot of problems for a lot of people largely me because I was the UI programmer so what I learned from that is if you're going to localize a game you have to do it right and you have to do it early that's that's key another thing we had to consider gone home is a narrative heavy indie game so what does that mean first narrative heavy means that if your primary language is not English and you can't really understand this English narrative

you're not going to get much out of the game in fact there's nothing else to the game than the story so if you can't understand the story you probably shouldn't buy the game and it's an indie game which means that we a fairly limited audience to start with and the more we can expand that audience to you know different speakers of different languages and so forth the better so you know that's good and then the the other thing we were considering is that we wanted to have as accessible accessible of a game as possible and it turns out that a lot of the things that one does to create an atmosphere for localization also help accessibility things like subtitles and easier readable text overlays and things like that so we've kind of be killing two birds with one stone by supporting some of those things but theirs was a little bit

of a problem gone Homes budget there there really wasn't one there were three of us who quit our jobs and moved into a house in Portland we lived together in this house and tried to make a game in the basement everything we spent came out of our personal savings it was the same wallet that we were using for our rent and our groceries and things like that so as a result of that we were highly motivated to do this cheaply we didn't want to spend our personal funds on anything we didn't have to so to kind of continue along that or further that point got homes content there was a lot of it again it's a narrative heavy game right so there's a ton of text both important story critical text and then just flavor text to kind of give the world a little bit

more depth all of this text most of this text except for the UI stuff is baked into textures and placed on objects in the world so it's not something that can be dynamically manipulated easily it's it's you know in these in these things and again there's a lot of audio that his is very well acted by professional voice actresses so there was a lot of content but here are some numbers these are just very rough numbers because all I did was use a program to kind of do a count of words so it's not accurate at all but it gives you some idea of the amount of scope we're talking about I did some research and contacted some some localization firms and one seemingly middle-of-the-road quote that I got was something like 20 cents a word a

language for localizing a game so at that rate localizing our game would pay our rent for over three years so that was obviously not an option we did we did want to localize the game but we didn't want to pay for it so how do we how do we do this well we decided to do a crowd source localization we wanted our users to localize the game for us you know we would put out the game and have people translate it into all their different languages and so the next question to ask is well what do we localize given that we're doing crowdsourcing well again we had these amazing professional voice actresses who did did the voice work for us and also we used unity which packages up audio

files into like a big binary file that that goes with your game and it's really hard to actually extract or replace audio files from this this giant package of binary stuff and so we decided to do text only localization it's also just a lot simpler to do we wanted to use subtitles for all the audio content for the baked in text on textures and objects and things we decided to do an overlay over those and UI text which is possible to change dynamically we just would swap out so I'm going to show you some examples what I'm talking about here so this is an example of some important and unimportant or flavor in this case maybe artificially flavored text it's indistinguishable maybe at first they both look like just kind of tables of figures or whatever but the one on the left helps the player to understand that

that there the this family has recently moved into this house the one on the right just kind of helps to provide a realistic world where soda has ingredients in it this is an example of the text overlay so this is the same moving invoice from the previous slide except it's been you know it's got some transparency on it so it's you can still see what exactly you're reading but it's it's no longer the main visual element and then overlaid on top of that there's much more readable text it happens to be in English but it could be you know anything because it's dynamically swappable here's another example of text overlay this is a book entitled making friends even when you're shy and it's got a post-it note on it that says Sam thought this might help sign dad so the player from this is supposed to understand that

Sam is maybe having some trouble making friends and that dad is trying to help but he's not very good at it so poor dad poor Sam but you can see how how text overlay works here with with 3d objects and and baked in text and then you know subtitles are just like subtitles in any other medium basically right there so yeah given we wanted to crowdsource our localization system how do you design a localization system with that in mind first things are needs to be easy for Steven Carla who actually wrote all the text in the game to edit it because they're going to be writing a lot of text and editing these files all the time and things like that it needs to be easy to translate for fans who actually want to do that it should be really obvious what sentences need to change into what different ones

and where to place these these various things it should also be easy to use for non-technical players that is you know you shouldn't need to do complicated things with your computer or download weird obscure software learn to use it or anything like that so the fairly obvious solution for this is that everything is in just plain text files that are at a particular location in the file structure of the operating system we used XML for subtitle data since it has you know timing information in it but also it's really simple xml layout basically so very easy for even non-technical people to edit all of this data the other interesting thing if you're crowdsourcing your localization is that you never have a full translation of your game that you can play and so you have to somehow test this without ever

actually using it which is kind of the the worst thing to be faced with as a software developer right the only way to test something is is to actually use it so in order to get around this problem a little bit I wrote some scripts to generate you know localized fake localized content one just took English strings and reversed them that's really nice because you can still basically read what everything is supposed to be and navigate the game and everything like that it's also really simple obviously to do another one is lorem ipsum or you just replace every string with an equivalent amount of lorem ipsum text which makes the game impossible to play because everything just says lorem everywhere but it does vary the length of the string and and everything it's also really obvious with both of these when they've been translated so you can tell very easily if something is being missed by the system or

whatever and then the last one that I wrote but we didn't actually end up using use the Google Translate API to just automatically translate strings from one from English to whatever language and put those in obviously that would be kind of the ideal solution because everything will end up being approximately the correct length and only it'll use all the special characters that you might find in that language it does cost a little bit of money though to use the Google Translate API not a whole lot I did some calculations and I figured out that we could translate our whole game for something like 20 to 25 bucks per language or something like that which isn't bad but we didn't end up using it anyway another thing we did was had lots and lots of warnings in the system whenever content was not found so that we hopefully would know right away when when something was was broken or missing and the last thing is we localized the

game to English as the default which means that when you're playing the game it's running through all of the stuff it would do normally to localize the game except it's just doing it into English so if the localization system ever entirely breaks down or if there's entirely missing content you see this because it doesn't work basically you don't you don't get to play the game big thing to remember about crowd sourcing is you've got a bunch of people doing a lot of work for you and they're not getting paid anything they're helping you out a whole bunch and so you need to help them to help you what we did is we we made a lot of documentation about this process and how to use it we publish this on our website as well as

packaging it with every copy of the game we tried to make the process as painless as possible again you know you don't need to download any weird software or anything like that all you need to do is go in and edit the plain text files it should be really easy to do because we didn't do again we didn't we never had a fully localized version of the game we knew that people were going to find bugs and they did and it's really important to respond to those really quickly we actually patched the game a few days after shipping it because there was some pretty bad localization bugs another thing that will happen is you know your translators will probably need clarification on the the text in the game especially gone home is set in 90s has told primarily from perspective of a teenage girl so there's a lot of idiom in the game text

and so a lot of that needs clarification as to like well what exactly does this mean and then again no one's getting paid for translating your game so the only thing they get is their name in lights so you should make those lights as bright as possible lots and lots of credit in whatever form people desire so I have your little URL for this localization specific page that we set up for for the game on this page we have again the documentation we have a chat area basically where people can ask questions and get responses and see you know these clarifications and responses from other users and we also that's where we put everyone's names for crediting with a link to the actual translation package that they produced so that that's kind of the one-stop shop

for all of this all this stuff so yeah we we went ahead and we did this we crowd sourced our localization how did that go well well when right was we are have been localized into more than languages for free that's really awesome we have a really enthusiastic community doing this stuff for us they're super engaged actually the Japanese translators have had I think like two interviews in FEM it soo so far awesome that's that's cool which which is kind of bizarre because I don't think any of the actual dev team has been interviewed in Famitsu about the game so you know awesome more power to you it was easy to add additional content to the game I think I mentioned

before that we we added a commentary mode a few weeks after the game shipped that was a huge amount of content and it went kind of painlessly into the game it didn't break any existing translations and just added a whole bunch more more stuff without any problems and the other thing is that popular languages will get supported so you know before you ship a game for all you know I don't know no one's going to play it in Germany or maybe you know it's really popular in Turkey or something like that like who knows you know if you if you have to pick all your languages that you're going to localize to before you ship you may not be able to target the right areas whereas crowd sourcing means that you'll get the languages that people are actually playing in except actually someone did an Esperanto translation have gone home and I don't think there are that many actual Esperanto players probably maybe I don't know flipside of

this of course is what what didn't go so well with this one thing is that the main the main thing we used for the translations is a very simple dictionary structure which so the the English sentence is the key and the translated sentence is the value basically this means that if the original sentence changes even in the most minor way like fixing a typo or changing punctuation or anything like that that entirely invalidates the translation and so that's obviously not ideal we it would be much better to have like a unique identifier system and so that you wouldn't lose the the translation when it changed we really screwed up the fonts we one of the things we had to ship with a patch right afterwards was was fixing some of the fonts for other character sets because they were just

way too big for actual people to use and then you know I mentioned all the stuff we did to test it was not nearly enough we missed the font thing for example there was a lot of other stuff going on with for people as the core team and a couple other testers helping us out we just did not have enough people or enough time or honestly put enough attention on testing the localization stuff and then we did we basically intentionally entirely ignored any sort of problem solving for UI spacing so if strings were longer than could fit in the UI when they're translated then I guess you need to change a translation sorry that was the best we could do um but there are yeah and then the biggest thing that went wrong is even though we shipped a Klingon font set with the game no-one has yet done a Klingon translation have gone home it's really

tragic but there are some more more caveats for doing doing crowd-sourced localization in general first one is that even though all the actual translation is being done by other people for free supporting localization in general as like a system is a gigantic task that touches pretty much every discipline that works on a game and it will take hours and hours of everyone's life more time than you think it will especially if you really want to do testing well it will take lots and lots of hours of this this is one thing if you actually pay for localization excuse me obviously you not only get people translating this stuff but you got very good qualified testers to go through and verify that all of this stuff works really well the other thing is that crowdsourcing your localization means

that when you launch your game you do not actually have any support for other languages so you can't check the little box in steam that says this game speaks German or whatever and you know what maybe you can never do that if your game just isn't popular enough with certain languages or people just don't feel like doing the work for you or whatever happens maybe you will put all this work into a localization system and no one will ever translate your game that would obviously be heartbreaking right so yeah I also have this is a slide I don't have a whole lot to say about it but these are the languages that gone home has been translated into so far Japanese has actually still a work in progress but this is kind of really impressive there's some very surprising things up there I wouldn't have picked check for a language that people would would want to play our game in or Turkish you know but hey this is amazing I'm really really gratified that

the community has has supported our game to this degree I'm really happy about it and yeah I don't I don't know that we have time for too many questions right now but if you want to get in touch with me here's how you can do it that's my email my Twitter handle and the URL for our game and thanks a lot for for coming [Applause] I think we have a couple of minutes for questions probably we have a couple of hundred questions for you but we could have accommodated this one sure how did you get the message out to have people come that's a really good question

actually so everyone on the development team for gone home is really severely addicted to Twitter and that has been kind of our prime means of community building for the game in general and so we had we had a number of things first of all went right before we shipped the game and the localization system was in place with you know how it would work and everything like that I made a big blog post detailing exactly how one would go about localizing with all these examples and and things like that and kind of tried to you know play it up as much as possible so that was you know we made that a big single news item about our game in the exciting run-up to launch and everything and then like I said everyone used Twitter and our game use you know we we tweeted a whole bunch of stuff about that every time we we had someone interested in doing a language

or that actually finished a translation we would make a big deal out of it on Twitter and say hey here's this awesome translation and yeah we posted on like the steam forums for our game and everything like that in order to try and try and build this this community and get people excited about about doing this for us obviously a large part of getting people excited about doing this sort of thing was you know people were excited about the game in general which was obviously really good and we're very very gratified for that but yeah I think that you know making making this a big feature that we we kind of sold as like hey look what you can do with our game or you the freedom to take our game and translate it and actually not not just that but you could rewrite the story if you wanted to because all the story is encoded there and text if you turn off the audio Diaries and just have

subtitles and replace all the text you can tell an entirely different story inside of our game which you know we we said hey check this out this is really cool this is the way you can mod gone home and no one's ever done that but you know the potential is there I hope someone does okay thanks gentlemen yeah thank you okay